Lead Review (Lowbridge)
- Book: Lowbridge
- Location: Australia
- Author: Lucy Campbell
Lowbridge is a chilling mystery with a cast of believable characters. It follows two timelines set in small-town New South Wales: one in the 1980s and the other thirty-odd years later. Lucy Campbell skilfully and gradually weaves these two stories together and eventually we learn why Lowbridge has kept its secrets for so long.
A trio of schoolgirls at Lowbridge High School look for ways to entertain themselves. They have the usual concerns: sport, boys and having fun without their parents’ anger crashing around them. Then a Lowbridge girl goes missing and everything changes. The people of the town close ranks – perhaps to protect the guilty? – and the mystery remains unsolved.
Katherine Ashworth and her husband Jamie Hayward move to Lowbridge in an attempt to recover from the grief of their own trauma. For Jamie the town is familiar – he grew up there. Katherine has the twin challenges of overcoming her agony and depression in order to find her feet in a new community. Discovering the town museum gives her a new sense of purpose, but stirring up the past soon starts to add to her problems.
Lowbridge is an absorbing read and, with a variety of red herrings and false leads, it kept me guessing. The characters support the storyline well, so that it’s hard to guess which are simply grumpy, which are genuinely charming, and which might hold the vital clues to the mystery of the girl’s disappearance.
The book’s structure is handled very well. It’s easy to tell whether a chapter is in the past or the present and to identify the links between the two time periods. In both timelines, the backstory is very gradually revealed – and I don’t want to spoil that by including too much detail here.
As a European myself, I felt that the book plays strongly to Australian stereotypes, where men hold the power, ganging together in an atmosphere of alcohol and chauvinism, and women are weak and downtrodden. Maybe it was really like that in the 1980s? However, it’s worth noting that this is very relevant to the story. There is also cause for optimism as Katherine sets about using her wits and skills to solve the mystery and set both the town and herself on the path to healing.
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